


Dream Moving Slow Through the Morning

by Elanor



Category: Captain America (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-21
Updated: 2012-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-02 07:58:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elanor/pseuds/Elanor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's mostly okay these days. Except when he's not, you see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Moving Slow Through the Morning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moosewingz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moosewingz/gifts).



It's okay, really. It is. Except when it's not, you see.

Steve's getting used to colour television, and really fast cars--Tony made him for the second one, constantly shutting him in a car and taking him on dangerously high-speed highway rides. Even airplanes, he's becoming accustomed to--they're like buses, but quieter and in the air.

It's the little things that get to him the most often--how his favourite ice cream brand doesn't exist anymore, how he can't find childhood memories except in history books and antique shops. He ran into someone he knew the other day, actually--little five year old Jane Winston from down the street, except of course now she's approaching eighty and going slightly spotty. Her life's flashed, raced, sprinted past Steve, and he's struck again with the weight of seventy years, nearly the span of a lifetime. People have lived and died while Steve was asleep, frozen under rock, and his friends and family and even his neighbourhood have slipped away with time.

Every once in a while, too, Steve is left gasping with the heaviness of want in his chest, the missing of everything he was used to. Even the accent he grew up hearing has changed as he was asleep--sometimes he goes to the cinema when they're showing what are now old films just so he can hear people who talk like he does, look like he's used to. He tries not to think about Peggy, left waiting on the dance floor; Bucky, lying at the bottom of a ravine; Howard, who apparently spent the rest of his life searching and searching and searching. Steve knows, he knows it's not his fault, none of it is, but he can't help but curl up sometimes and clutch his ankles and bury his face in his knees like a little boy, yearning for everything to be put right, for everything to be the way it was.

*

Steve's New York is--was--staggeringly different from the New York of now and today. The buildings have grown twenty stories, the alleyways become even narrower, the streets even busier and more filled with honking, shouting cars. He tried to take a shortcut to headquarters yesterday, and found his way blocked by a shiny department store on top of the alley where he'd had his first beer with Bucky. That's another thing, really--so many of his memories have been built on, paved over. The hospital he was born in has become an apartment building; the place he grew up is still there, but it's been converted into an intimidatingly wealthy-looking block of houses. The alleyway a uniformed Bucky beat up someone for him the day before he left is now under a nightclub, blaring and flashing.

One day when he's feeling particularly shitty, Steve goes to the public library and looks up newspapers, looking for comfort and familiarity. What he gets instead is a crash course in the immediate aftermath of his assumed death--the initial abundance of headlines about the search for "National Hero Captain America" which slowly trickles away, becoming the occasional local headline on a slow news day about "Howard Stark's Continued Desperate Search for Captain America". He knows he shouldn't, but he spends all day in there, tracking just how heartbreakingly close Howard came to finding him. So many what-ifs fill his mind, the raised hope and dashed promise of normality he'll never quite find again, and Steve can't help it, he crumples onto the desk and buries his face in his arms, gripping his elbows with white knuckles until he can stop shaking.

*

One weekend, Steve takes a day trip down to Arlington to visit Bucky's grave. He sits there in front of the plain white headstone and talks to Bucky for hours, telling him everything. How they have these new things called cell phones now, how cars go at unimaginable speeds, how Steve misses Bucky almost even more despite the fact that he's been dead seventy years.

As the sun begins to set, Steve falls silent and just sits there, one hand on the headstone and another gripping the flowers he brought for him--hyacinths, his favourite although he would never admit it. Steve smiles as he remembers how Bucky used to buy hyacinths for all the girls he dated just because he loved the smell of them, and right then what he wants most in the world is to be able to hug Bucky one last time, tell him goodbye properly, feel the weight and bulk of him in his arms, the feel of his shoulder underneath his chin.

But of course he can't, so Steve settles for resting his forehead on the cool grass and whispering everything he wishes he could have said before into the earth. He doesn't cry, not there. As night sets in, Steve gets up stiffly, kisses Bucky's headstone one last time, and leaves without looking back.


End file.
